shoggoth

Not very different from this http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm

One of the conclusions that just about all scientific bodies related to climate accept is that human activity is contributing to global warming. That would be a consensus conclusion. Obviously not every aspect of climate science has a consensus view, some parts are still open ended. But that doesn't mean every aspect is unknown and has no consensus.

Yes we do. The amount of co2 humans put into the atmosphere each year is about twice as much as co2 is actually rising. Human emissions can not only explain the entire rise, but for human emissions to not explain the rise would require something in nature to be increasingly absorbing human co2 while emitting other co2 in it's place. The oceans are currently absorbing more co2 than they emit due to the high concentration of co2 in the atmosphere vs the upper ocean. This is something the swindle documentary failed to comment on, instead it misleadingly implied that co2 rise today is due to a warmer ocean. Not if a doubling of co2 results in 3C warming. Oxygen is not a greenhouse gas

Yet it is not logical. Consensus isn't some meaningless phenomenon as creationists and crichton alike would like to claim. Consensus allows lay people to get a good idea of where the science is at. The strength of consensus is that it's more often correct than minority views. For every consensus theory that has turned out wrong throughout history there have been dozens of minority theories that have turned out wrong. So yes it is illogical to assume a minority theory held by half a dozen experts is just as likely as one held by thousands simply on the basis that thousands of experts have been wrong in the past. There is a consensus on global warming. The official positions of the NAS, the AAAS, NASA, NOAA, etc have a lot of common ground on this issue. The fundamental common ground shared is they all accept the recent co2 rise has been manmade, and that will cause warming. Furthermore they do not accept the sun has caused the entire 20th century warming. And unlike global warming today, there was no consensus on the issue from those scientific bodies above. The 1975 NAS report for example said that the direction of future temperature was uncertain.

About 25%, that is the rise in atmospheric co2 concentration from pre-industrial 280ppm to 382ppm today is virtually all human caused. The "global warming swindle" documentary is an example of distortion of the facts rather than presenting them fairly. Their claim that volcanoes emit more co2 than man for example is BS

One thing I notice is that the points Crichton makes about consensus in science are the same points that creationists use. Similar situation where it pays to emphasize scientists that do not accept the mainstream theory while trying to argue away the significance of there being a consensus.

Better go back and watch again. They said the average temperature was warmer in the forties, which it was. As the graph shows. Not according to the other graph they showed multiple times in the documentary which I linked to above. I agree with you that the documentary contradicts itself.

Even the swindle documentary contained global average temperature graphs which did not match the US historical records, and show temperatures were not warmer in the 1940s: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/03/spot..._difference.php

Yes peaking today, while temperatures reached their peak around 1940 as opposed to today. Temperatures are at their highest level today since records began (back to about 1880) so temperature couldn't have reached it's peak around 1940

Im refering to industrial output of co2. It's peaking today, it didn't peak in the 40s. Yes I did watch the movie.

Industrial output didn't peak around WW2

In the atmosphere a quarter of co2 is there because of human activity. 4% of emissions is an amount greater than the rate co2 is rising per year (ie human emissions can fully explain the rise in co2 from 280ppm to 380ppm). Therefore that rise over the last 150 years has led to about a quarter of co2 in the atmosphere being attributable ot human activity. It's the increase, not the concentration that's important. If water vapor has remained constant, it cannot have contributed to any warming. co2 levels have increased 30% in the past 150 years. Water vapor levels have not increased that much. The increase in water vapor that has occured is a consequence of global warming - warmer air holds more water vapor. Water vapor is acting as an amplification of whatever is causing the warming, not the root cause. So rather than making the temperature rise from increasing co2 insignificant, water vapor feedback actually makes the warming from a co2 increase more than it would be. The IPCC projections for temperature in the next 100 years for example are based on water vapor being an important feedback amplification. I notice the site you link to doesn't mention that..

I stopped recycling because it was too time consuming. Actually I never started. Same reason though.

The whole documentary is filled with out-of-date information. Most of it's graphs for example appear to be out of date.

Increasing co2 causes temperature to rise (immediately) Increasing temperature causes co2 to rise (not necessarily immediately) Both are true Roughly a quarter of co2 in the atmosphere today is man made. There is good evidence that at the end of cold glacial periods temperature starts increasing first and co2 follows about 600 years later. In turn that co2 rise will contribute to the temperature rise which continues for thousands of years more.

Correct. However at least two PEER REVIWED papers recently published show a cooling in the ocean in recent years. So if it is true then more CO2 is now being absorbed back into the ocean waters. Negliable amounts compared to what is being emitted. Emissions are the driving force behind co2 rise at this time rather than ocean temperature. co2 rise has shown no slowdown in the last few years. The cooling of the oceans is at a certain depth, and preliminary results indicate that cooling was temporary and has ceased.

What about this one: Warmer ocean surface: less carbon absorbed from atmosphere by ocean

The CFC/ozone depletion issue is a mini example of the current global warming issue in that it was a political issuse based on a climate science. It was full of the same kind of stuff - environmental advocates, industry skeptics, media articles, global meetings, treaties, etc. Similar arguments about hidden motives were made about the cfc issue that we hear today in the global warming issue. I think a lot of them were true - a lot of envioronmentalists will just jump on any issue that supports their position, and they jumped on CFC-ozone depletion link for that reason. Yet the CFC-ozone depletion link turned out to be true. Which demonstrates that while hidden motives and politics among environmentalists and skeptics exist in the global warming issue, it's likely irrelevant to the validity of the issue.

*edited* nevermind then

motion passes supporting Kyoto? That doesn't mean Kyoto passed does it?

I put this argument about thousands of years of human adaptation to someone myself a while back, and their response was: Did they have to move cities back then though? Humans are not randomly distributed around the earth and we are generally homed in on habital regions and away from less hospitable ones. Cities are in places wiht good water access generally for example. Any change is more likely to result in a worse situation than a better one, because we already are in a better than avergage position. How worse is debatable though.

Not mentioned are some of the other things the paper says (http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/h.j.fowler/fowl...cher_JC2006.pdf) But no doubt this paper will be added by the skeptics to the "not all scientists are convinced" stack.

It's precisely because ozone cannot be created faster than it is destroyed by chlorine that levels of it reduce in the antarctic each winter and spring. Seems an apt name to give to something that is a regional depletion of something in both area and depth The hole grows and wanes in a cycle each year (in both depth and area), but the issue was about the maximum depth and area increasing since the 70s That's a myth based on a misinterpretation of what he did see. Dobson found that antarctic ozone levels in the spring are less than the arctic ozone levels in spring, due to difference in weather. Measurements of ozone at that time show the late 50s were the same as the 60s and early 70s (the hole didn't start growing until about the mid 70s onwards)

I also remember some people giving dire predictions about terrorism during the 90s... The Y2K bug wasn't a prediction, it was a real possibility. Much like there is a real possibility of a terrorist attack in 2007, not a prediction. No computer expert was able to honestly discount the Y2K bug because to do that would require inside knowledge of the inner workings of hundreds of company systems around the world, and who has access to that kind of info? The worst case senarios of planes falling from the skys and traffic lights blinking out were at the very low end of possibility, but the only slightly less worse case senario of bank systems screwing up and a short term financial meltdown was a very real possibilities. All it takes is an important banking system to ignore out-of-date data because it's now being marked as 1900 and you would have chaos. Which was why governments and businesses took the issue seriously and invested over a year in some cases to Y2K auditing on their systems, and no doubt many problems were ironed out this way (of course we will never know how many systems actually had genuine y2k problems as it's not the kind of thing companies want to discuss)

I just provided some links showing that the Sun is CURRENTLY well above the average in solar irradiance of the past 1000 year and even up to 8000 years. You also mentioned the explaination that the warming seen in the ground surface record over the last 30 years is an artifact of the urban heat island effect. If that were true then it means the sun isn't responsible for any of the warming seen in the record in the past 30 years. Any warming urban heat island is responsible for, the sun cannot be, and vice versa. So either they are both responsible in part, or one is responsible and the other is not at all. The early 20th century temperature increase correlated with a rather large solar output increase, but the recent temperature increase doesn't correlate with any such large solar increase. The NASA study you linked to is only a very subtle increase compared to the early 20th century increase. If that subtle rise can explain 0.5C warming seen in the records over the last 30 years then the much large solar increase seen in the early 20th century should have caused much more of an increase. Perhaps there is a lag involved though. Perhaps the warming now is just a continuation of the early 20th century warming trend caused by the large solar increase back then. Perhaps something in the 40s-60s was countering the warming trend but whatever that was has now gone and the warming trend caused by high solar output is continuing. That's a possibility which I cannot see any evidence against.